A suggestion, I'm aware a lot come in, & maybe there's something I don't know but here goes:
Make merchandise into a low level (combat knife/whipping cane level) craftable item. In my thinking it'd take scrap metal & scrap cloth, perhaps 5 of each makes 10 merchandise, or 20, something along this line.
The reasoning is, the inability to make or buy merchandise is really counterintuitive given that it's the primary faction request of the Industry & Trade factions (Catholic & Muslim). Again maybe I'm missing something but from anything I can see, Aesir benefit to some degree under the craft system. You can make swords & rifles, even if slave raiding is generally going to get you farther, faster, you can use craft to do something helpful pretty early on if you feel like it.
Catholics *can* get to gold necklace, but that's hundreds or even thousands of combat knife unless you save & reload over & over again which rapidly kills immersion, & Muslims have zero crafting or trade options. I do understand selling hides to Drenner village is a means to get the resources they ask for, which is why I was thinking scrap metal as a component, it adds another level of value to scavenging in keeping with the seeming sense that survival skill is intended to be important to these factions.
So in summary, unless it'd somehow break something else, adding one button worth of coding would add additional potential playstyles for crafting, scavenging, & two major factions, so I'm hopeful this isn't one of those suggestions that asks you to use time on a niche thing 95% of people will never see.
It might also be fun if the orphans had a rng to give you merchandise they made when you come to visit, after you upgrade the Building level to max but that's a bit off-topic.
All of this having been typed out, hopefully it's coherent without begin overly wordy. If you (Grimdark) do read it, thanks you for such a great game, I'm really happy I came back to it.
One final note, I'm playing Aesir with very solid control of the faction, so if there are quests or something that does everything I just said which require being a member of the religion, I'll feel silly & not be too surprised, this game gets alot right. :)